Talk:Gnar/@comment-7460908-20140908180827/@comment-6281696-20140911145825
Boomerang has a horrendous CD and ridiculously low values early on, making even that a fairly insignificant threat. And the issue is that mini just isn't really good at anything (especially early on), which is a danger anything with 2 forms faces since usually these kind of characters are balanced around the notion that they can do both things, but neither as good as their specialized counterparts. However, in this case (mini) Gnar is too undertuned, and what he does have in terms of advantages (free AS, relative high basespeed) doesn't kick in until the laning phase has long since ended. Which just makes him a weak version of vayne with no advantages that occasionally, and very predictably and thus in an easy to counter way, changes into a fairly decent heavy CC bruiser which thanks to the predictability is borderline useless since nearly every capable opponent will just hang back for a wave and then continue to bully you. If he could switch freely it'd already be less of an issue since at least you could then just use the most favorable form to get through the laning phase, but since you are required to spend time in both forms both forms also NEED to be good. If either form, especially the form in which you spend the majority of the time which is in this case mini, is easy to abuse by opponents he just becomes dead easy to defeat/bully. Which so far has consistently happenend. Oddly enough the only lane in which I consistently traded favorably was against a Renekton, this was because whenever Renekton came in for his combo I could get a W-proc of (might also have been a rather mediocre renekton). For all the others getting a w-proc either meant I had to actually engage, in which case most tops outfight him, or the opposing player had to be a morron and was just sort of standing there and not responding to me or trying to dodge my boomerang. And their own harrasement tends to beat Gnars since most outrange his AA's and just the occasional boomerang is kind of neglectible especially early on with its low values and massive CD. Anyway, I remain with my point, Mini needs to not just be kind of a bad Vayne, he needs to be properly balanced to be good in that form as well as good in mega form. As you said, if he were balanced around mini he'd actually have aspects in which he beats Vayne by a significant margin. But he isn't balanced in that way. It's balanced as if it's a sort of larvae state, which leads to these issues. Issue with Cho wasn't that I was constantly hit, it was that whenever I was hit I was essentially dead. I might have dodged 90% of the ruptures, but eventually I would notice one too late, which interupts your E, get knocked up and be eaten. I ended up dying about 3 times in lane while still having reasonable farm with his boomerang, if Gnar didn't have his range and mobility I'd have died at least 10 times and have close to no farm. Also, my own harrasement was utterly neglectible since in order to harras you have to get in range of his silence, and his spikes if he's hitting something in front of you since just the occasional boomerang won't do anything against Cho's sustain, you at the very least need W-procs, and getting silenced makes his rupture a lot easier to hit since I can't jump away anymore. Not to mention that silence + a couple of spikes already hurts you quite badly until you got a couple of items because you have no natural defenses in mini. So that ended up being increadibly high risk, low reward, and thus not worth it.